Water Science Network | Michigan State University

30 Jan

Environmental Perception of Wetland Ecosystems

Hello All!

In the Fall we received this post from Toni Walkowiak, the most recent Rose Graduate Fellowship in Water Research recipient. Due to some web issues, we weren’t able to post to the blog so we apologize for this late posting but hope you now enjoy learning about the great work Toni is doing!

Autumn colors engulf an ancient glacial spillway that was once flowing with water and surrounded by wetlands.
(Photo taken by Toni A. Walkowiak)

It is that time of year again! The weather is cooling, the colors of fall are beginning to appear and families are packing up their summer toys. The seasonal fun of Summer is coming to an end. Our minds are, reluctantly, switching to apple cider, pumpkin pie, and the fall harvest, which makes this a perfect time to discuss water resources.

No matter what time of year, water researchers are continuously thinking of innovative ways to encourage sustainable water resource practices. That being said, we must first evaluate whether people understand how water resources function and how people benefit from them, or if they even think about these things, at all. This is where my research comes in…

A quick disclaimer – studying all water resources are well beyond the scope of this research. Nevertheless, I have taken on the distinct and worthwhile challenge of gathering environmental perception data regarding wetland ecosystem services within Michigan. I know, you’re thinking… what on Earth? In non-science jargon, I am evaluating whether Michiganders are able to differentiate between what wetlands do (their functions) and how humans and wildlife benefit from these functions (their values).

A coastal (marine) wetland nestled into Lake St. Clair Metropark within Macomb County, Michigan that helps to prevent flooding.
(Photo provided by Toni A. Walkowiak)

To make things even more complicated, I am asking people to describe wetlands, discuss what services they provide, and why these services are important to them. I also ask them to think about what internal and external values wetlands offer.

Again, you say… what? Think of it this way… Wetlands provide an immeasurable amount of ecosystem services. For instance: wetlands guard the neighboring areas from countless flooding events (a function), which in turn protects those who live nearby (an internal value); and, wetlands help recharge the surrounding groundwater (a function) that provides a favorable water quality for drinking/irrigation throughout the immediate area (an internal value). Additionally: wetlands offer a myriad fish species and other amphibious life (a function) for animal/human consumption (an external value); wetlands also afford a wealth of educational opportunities (an external value) because of the biodiversity supplied by the wetland (a function).

Now we are cooking with peat (another external value provided by wetlands), and are able to dive into the specifics of my research design.

Sundown on the shores of Lake Huron after a full day of door-to-door canvassing within Huron County, Michigan.
(Photo captured by Toni A. Walkowiak)

Throughout this summer and early autumn, I have been canvassing door-to-door and cold calling to ask Michiganders for their participation with my research experiments (a life changing endeavor).

These experiments range from an online card sorting experiment, where participants sort 30 digital cards into 2 categories: functions or values; to a semi-structured focus group discussion/interview forum, which asks participants a series of 8 questions regarding the values (internal and external) of wetlands.

The purpose of these experiments are to gather data regarding people’s perceptions of wetland ecosystem services, and whether they understand how wetlands operate for the benefit of the surrounding ecosystem.

Thus far, my research indicates that participants are a tad confused by what constitutes a wetland function or value. Namely, some believe that water quality is a function. On the contrary, water quality is a value that a wetland affords us. Consider this… water purification is a function that wetlands perform, which is another way of saying that the “water” is ready for consumption. Thus, “water quality” is a value because consumption is a benefit provided by wetlands.

Brimley Wetland Preserve on a rainy summer day in Chippewa County, Michigan on the Bay Mills Tribal Reservation.
(Photo supplied by Toni A. Walkowiak)

In addition, it seems people are more influenced by the mindset of “not in my back yard (NIMYB)” versus the overall services that wetlands provide and we benefit from. That is to say, people would rather drain and destroy the wetland ecosystem than find an alternative solution that would leave the wetland intact, because as one participant stated… “I hope I am not paying taxes on land I cannot use.”

A sad reality in many ways, but all the more reason this research will have a broader impact to inspire educators as well as water researchers to push for wetland educational reform and wetland protection reform. Clearly, we have yet to completely explore what wetlands are truly capable of as one of greatest natural resources this planet offers.

Palustrine wetland (marsh) with tall grasses and native species, situated near Lake St. Clair within Macomb County, Michigan, and aids with water purification. (Photo obtained by Toni A. Walkowiak)

Luckily, with this research, I have found a ray of sunshine lying hidden within Chippewa County: A 22-pond wetland complex that was created, outside of the mitigation laws, in order to encourage the return of native species, which include: waterfowl, insects, migratory birds, grasses, and trees, etc. This wetland complex offers a glimmer of hope for water researchers looking to demonstrate how people working together can make a difference.

Munuscong Potholes (Image captured by Toni A. Walkowiak)

Munuscong Pothole complex (Image captured by Toni A. Walkowiak)

Munuscong Potholes (Image captured by Toni A. Walkowiak)

11 Apr

Library support for teaching and research

By Eric Tans, Environmental Sciences Librarian, MSU Library

For those of you that do not know me, I would like to take this opportunity to introduce myself. As the Environmental Sciences Librarian, my job is to support and assist students, faculty, and staff with teaching and research across all environmental disciplines, including water! But what does that actually mean, and how can I help you? I can share some examples to illustrate my role on campus.

Last fall, members of Dr. Bob Montgomery’s RECaP lab approached me about collaborating on a paper. They were interested in tracking publishing trends on articles related to human and lion interactions worldwide. We worked together to target the most appropriate databases and terms for searching, and after conducting some sample searches we were ready to proceed. I carried out the searches, downloaded the citations, and accumulated and organized PDFs of every article in the search results. I shared all of this with the research team so they were able to focus on analyzing the article content rather than spending time and energy running searches and organizing the results. My final contribution to the paper was to write portions of the methods and results sections, describing how I conducted the search along with an analysis of the results. I am very pleased to have the opportunity to contribute to this research project, and I would be happy to provide assistance to other projects related to environmental science and water research as appropriate.

I also assist with teaching, primarily by delivering presentations to students on finding and using library resources. These sessions can happen in the library or in the classroom, but they work best when delivered in tandem with a research based assignment that can provide a framework for the session. I can customize my presentation to match your course content and I often develop an online research guide that compiles all the relevant library research tools in one convenient location. I’ve delivered library instruction to courses across disciplines and departments, including Fisheries and Wildlife, Sociology, Geography, Engineering, Lyman Briggs, and James Madison.

My role on campus is to support student learning and research related to environmental science and water at MSU. I encourage anyone interested research collaborations, library instruction, or searching assistance to contact me at tans@msu.edu.

03 Feb

The Food-Energy-Water Nexus

By Steve Pueppke, Director of Global and Strategic Initiatives, CANR

With several others from MSU, I recently attended the National Council for Science and the Environment’s conference on “The Food-Energy-Water Nexus.” We convened for almost three days in Washington, narrowly escaping a snowstorm that barreled down on the Capital City as we were leaving. The conference program included plenary sessions, symposia, and workshops, and since the venue was inside the Beltway, I had anticipated learning how federal funding agencies are preparing to respond to what has become something of a FEW Craze. This was not to be. Representatives of the usual suspect agencies were at the podium, but we learned more of current and past activities than future plans. This was a disappointment.

The conference nevertheless stimulated much thought on my part. I came away armed with several new pithy sayings, including “Stop treating soil like dirt” and—this one from a venture capitalist— “If we are the smartest ones in the room, then we know that we are in the wrong room.” There were also surprises. Who would have guessed that US water withdrawals for agriculture are actually declining? Or thought that at current rates of obesity increases, the world will not have to feed 9 billion people by 2050 but rather the equivalent of 10-11 billion people crammed into 9 billion overly large bodies? Or who has heard farmers measuring productivity per cubic foot (this from the vertical agriculture crowd)?

Mostly, though, I was and still am intrigued by the results of a survey taken by an NGO and reported to us on the second day. This was not just an informal poll. The survey instrument was carefully designed, and it was distributed to a variety of stakeholders and others in the “FEW space” – academics, governmental people, NGOs, and those working in the private sector. The No. 1 finding, one that caught the survey takers off guard, is that few stakeholders can identify topics that hit the nexus of FEW as opposed to those that lie within the F or the E or the W. This was apparent from the talks, including many of the plenaries. With few exceptions, speakers would state or imply that they are comfortable in the F or the E or the W space, confine their comments to this space, and leave the other spaces and indeed the nexus to someone else. I came away with the crazy sense that while many intuitively feel that FEW is important and can mouth words about it, few are capable of actually articulating the concept. Here we were at a conference billed as the FEW Nexus, yet the FEW nexus was off in hiding!

The survey also pointed out that while we tend to think about F and E and W, underlying issues are crucial. In particular, policy and human behavior underlie the entire nexus concept. We can arrive at the best articulation of the nexus and apply ourselves to problems, but unless enlightened policies are in place, and unless people are will to respond, all could be for naught. Misguided agricultural subsidies were often cited as examples of bad policy. Nutrition came up as an example of a behavioral problem where what people do is misaligned with what the experts know they should do. And a final point from the survey: the experts believe, and I agree, that the nexus of FEW is fraught with uncertainty and vulnerability. Climate change cast a long shadow over the conference, and it is clear that actions based on just the F or just the E or just the W can hurt vulnerable people and damage the environment.

Given our collective strengths at MSU, we may be able to help address the challenges revealed by the survey. Could we collectively refine the concept of a FEW nexus and then articulate problems that lie at its center? Could this low boundaries institution find a way to mix policy and behavior into our FEW activities, rather than consigning underlying make it or break it issues to someone else? These are questions now being addressed not just by the MSU Water Science Network, but across campus.

14 Sep

A Summer of Great Lakes Research

By KATERI SALK

This is the time of year when young students are asked to reflect on their experiences over summer break and write their back-to-school essay. The summer season is often the busiest, filled with activities, sunshine, and (hopefully) some quality time on the water. For aquatic scientists, although we don’t generally get a break over the summer, this pattern holds. We try our best to capture the burst of biological, chemical, and physical activity that occurs in water bodies in the summertime. It seems appropriate, as a graduate student studying water, that I do a similar reflection. Here it is: my “What I Did Last

Summer” essay.

Evening operations of a sediment sampler on Lake Superior (photo by Kateri Salk)

I’ve had the privilege this year to study the largest freshwater body in the world, the Laurentian Great Lakes. Together, the five lakes make up nearly 20% of the Earth’s fresh water and supply 40 million people with drinking water. Being so large and depended on by so many people, the Great Lakes have unique ecology and environmental issues that are fascinating for aquatic scientists to study. The research I conducted this summer has, in many ways, explored two extremes within the Great Lakes. The projects I worked on took me to Lake Superior (the clearest, deepest, and most surrounded by wilderness) and Lake Erie (the shallowest, most populous, and most impacted by algae blooms).

An aerial photo of an algal bloom in the western basin of Lake Erie (photo by Daniel Raible, NASA Glenn)

What ties these dissimilar environments together is a common question: how is the biology of the system interacting with a key element for life, nitrogen? Which organisms are using nitrogen, and what happens to it after organisms take it in or transform it chemically? In Sandusky Bay in Lake Erie, a great deal of nitrogen runoff flows from the Sandusky River into the bay. Much of this nitrogen is lost from the water before it reaches the main part of Lake Erie, so we want to know which organisms are responsible for this reduction and how it might be impacting the species of toxic algae that grow in Sandusky Bay vs. the main part of the lake. In collaboration with a team from Bowling Green State University, I’ve been tracking the microbes that remove dissolved nitrogen from the water and release it to the atmosphere. We hope to be able to make connections between toxic algae growth and the trends in nutrients, including nitrogen, in Lake Erie.

While Lake Erie struggles with pea-green water that’s packed with algae, Lake Superior is crystal clear, mainly because of a lack of phosphorus, a nutrient that supports algal growth. Sandusky Bay displays boom-and-bust trends in nitrogen concentrations, whereas Lake Superior has a more constant, moderate amount of nitrogen that is left behind in the water because algal growth is limited by phosphorus. One possible commonality between the two environments is that microbial communities could be converting dissolved nitrogen to a chemical form called nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas that contributes to climate change. For both projects, I am investigating which communities of microbes are producing nitrous oxide and how much of it is released to the atmosphere.

As different as these two projects were in terms of the environment, scientific operations were quite different as well. In Sandusky Bay, the depth of the water is just a few meters deep. This means that research can be done from a motorboat, and water can be collected directly into a bottle from the side of the boat. Even sediment can be gathered by means of a long tube, a gasket that pulls suction, and a little muscle.

Sediment collection from Sandusky Bay. Notice the bright green color of the water; the algal bloom is out in full force!

Lake Superior science is a different beast. This research was done aboard a research ship, the R/V Blue Heron (its sister ship is the one from The Perfect Storm, to give you an idea of its size and the high seas it can handle). Scientists work and live on the ship for several days on end, and there is a full-time crew that runs the ship while research goes on. Water and sediment collections must be done with heavy equipment that is deployed by motorized winches, and hard hats are worn on deck.

Ship operations on the R/V Blue Heron in Lake Superior. Sediment and water collectors are lowered on motorized winches, often hundreds of feet below the surface. Notice how blue and clear the water is in comparison to Lake Erie (photos by Chris Filstrup, Tristan Horner and Kateri Salk)

This research campaign was part of a training program run by the Large Lakes Observatory at the University of Minnesota. In addition to the research I conducted on board the ship, I also was trained on how to lead scientific operations aboard a research vessel. This meant that I got to experience the wide variety of the capabilities of the ship: collecting water and sediment, deploying large nets to collect tiny swimming animals (zooplankton), using remotely operated vehicles to explore beneath the surface, and setting off in a small boat to collect samples in shallow water.

Shipboard research involves many activities: collecting water and chemistry data from a variety of depths, using nets to collect small swimming organisms, practicing driving a remotely operated vehicle in a container on board, and setting off into the Apostle Islands for a shallow water expedition (photos by Tristan Horner and Chris Filstrup)

Just as the school kids are back in class, it’s time for me to shift out of summer mode. I plan to spend my fall semester in the laboratory, analyzing the samples that have been collected from the Great Lakes over the summertime. Many thanks to the Rose Fellowship in Water Research, the MSU College of Natural Science, and the MSU Department of Integrative Biology for supporting this research.

Kateri Salk is a Ph.D. student in Integrative Biology and Environmental Science and Policy. She is the first recipient of the Joan Rose Fellowship in Water Research.

19 Mar

Questions about WaterCube? Check here.

The MSU Water Science Network recently announced our new WaterCube program. Our announcement generated a lot of excitement- and a lot of questions (If you missed the announcement, see Steve Pueppke’s post and the WaterCube page). To help answer those questions, we want to let you know where to go to find answers and give you a brief overview of the program.

Where to find answers to your questions: You can find a more detailed explanation in the WaterCube Program description. We also recommend that you check out our WaterCube Info for Faculty page which provides answers to frequently asked questions about the program like how to get a token and which colleges are participating.

So how does the WaterCube program work? The guiding idea behind the program is to provide a different type of internal funding mechanism that focuses on stimulating research ideas without the large time commitment involved in proposal writing and review. We want faculty to focus their time and effort on innovative ideas and going after external funds rather than an internal proposal. That’s why we created the WaterCube. To boil things down for you, here’s an outline of the major steps in the program:

Colleges create tokens worth $20,000.
Faculty members receive tokens from their colleges.
Faculty members with tokens form teams or WaterCubes. Each WaterCube must:
1. Include at least three faculty with tokens
2. Contain tokens from at least two different colleges
3. Contain at least one member who is a new collaborator (these aren’t just the same old teams!)
Teams propose WaterCubes by registering online.
Approved WaterCubes receive at least $60,000 ($20,000 per token) for two years to produce external grants and publications.

That’s it! Once a WaterCube has been proposed, the ESPP and Water Science Network team will quickly screen the proposed cube to ensure that it meets the three criteria in #3 above, confirm the availability of funds, and work with colleges to award the funds.

16 Mar

Cubation: Announcing the WaterCube

by Steve Pueppke

I’ve been invited to give a talk on the role of fresh water fisheries in food security, and this has got me to thinking more broadly about water and how it plays into food production. I’m concerned about the future, and I sense that I am not the only one. There is a growing realization that water is a limiting factor—perhaps the most limiting factor—in getting adequate amounts of food into hungry mouths in poorer parts of the planet. Water is creeping higher on the food agenda here, too. Think, for example, of breadbasket states like California, which is in the midst of its third year of severe drought with no end in sight.

Unsettling news is everywhere. We hear about plunging water tables, not just in India and other developing countries, but in drier parts of the US, where withdrawals for irrigation have been outpacing recharge rates for years. We see photos of rivers that don’t quite make it to the sea as water is unsustainably diverted for other uses far upstream. We read about land grabbing by powerful, narrow interests, not just as a means to control agriculture, but as a stealth means to control water resources. And there is no shortage of news coverage of the world’s changing climate and its potential impacts on rainfall patterns.

Because of my background, I tend to filter these disturbing reports through the lens of land-based crop production. But in preparing my talk, I’ve been forced to think, too, about a parallel source of food security: calories that come directly from the water. Aquaculture figures prominently into this equation, but fishing is important, too. Stephen Hall and his collaborators (Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA 110, 8393-8398) document the disproportionate role that wild-caught fish play in meeting human protein needs in more than a dozen developing countries. Those interested in fish (including some of our very own, see Global Food Security 3, 142-148) have struggled for years to raise awareness of the significance of finned creatures in feeding poor people. But there is still lack of appreciation for this second pathway that water takes in helping to feed people.

I am not the only one boxed in by disciplinary bias in approaching what is in fact a wicked systems problem. Some like me bring the perspective of land-based agriculture. Others focus on fish. Still others take a broad natural resources approach with no particular emphasis on water as a means of food production. The MSU Water Community has been recently brought up to full strength, with new expertise joining old expertise aligned along each of these and other perspectives. If we want to attack the water-food problem or any other problem having water as a major component, how do we match up and integrate the right kinds expertise on campus, creating the most productive research teams to get the job done?

In a perfect world, someone who has spent his or her entire career trying to increase crop yields in Africa would immediately grasp the value of a new colleague who knows a lot about water. Or vice versa. But in the real world understanding across disciplinary boundaries rarely appears spontaneously, and when it does, progress usually comes in fits and starts. Minds occasionally do meet serendipitously, but the process is often slow and inefficient at big, complicated places like MSU.

That’s why with support from the Office of the Vice-President for Research and Graduate Studies and other campus offices, ESPP is about to roll out WaterCube. We want to maximize the chances that water researchers at MSU will find one another, click as a research team, and solve an important problem—either a water and food security issue or some other crucial problem centered on water.

WaterCube is not your grandfather’s program for awarding internal grants. There are no pre-defined research goals, no grant proposals, and no review panels. Instead, individual water faculty willing to invest a bit of their own research funds will earn a token that has much more value. But the value can only be realized if the token is united with tokens from one or more faculty partners willing to commit to a cool new research project. The token holders get to decide on the nature of the project.

We call this process cubation (toking was also considered but we thought that this word might be misinterpreted). Cubation is designed to create novel water teams and provide them with seed funding to tackle something new. We want to minimize transaction costs, and we want team members to have fun discovering one another and working together. So within very broad bounds, it is up to the cubation team to define objectives and the scope of the work, to make progress towards a solution, and ultimately to attract external funding.

All of the major problems that count these days require complex solutions that transcend what any one discipline can offer. Cubation is about putting people together in the right configurations to tackle the right problems. Let the experiment begin.

04 Mar

What happened to the Global Water Initiative?

If you visited water.msu.edu in the past, it was home to the MSU Global Water Initiative. So what happened to it? The answer is that the Global Water Initiative was essentially a hiring initiative and hiring is now complete. Through the Initiative, we added 16 new faculty members to our MSU water community (check out the list of new faculty at the end of this post).

Although the hiring initiative has ended, fostering water science on campus has not. That’s why we’re transitioning this site to the MSU Water Science Network. Over the years, many of us- from the Center for Water Sciences to the Environmental Science and Policy Program to individual faculty and many others- have worked to facilitate and advance water science and education here at MSU. The Water Science Network website pulls information about all of our efforts into one place. We hope this site offers “one-stop shopping” for all things water at MSU. But wait, there’s more…

The Water Science Network isn’t just a website. Our goal is to build rapid synergies and working relationships among faculty, facilitate joint research grants, and promote MSU as a center of excellence in water. We’ll be offering networking opportunities and other events to build these relationships and promote interdisciplinary collaboration across campus. We’re also designing innovative programs to support research ideas to bolster grant funding. It’s an exciting time for water science at MSU- we invite all faculty to engage in the Network and help us move forward.

Global Water Initiative Hires:

Bruno Basso, Geological Sciences and Kellogg Biological Station

Eric Benbow, Entomology

Jennifer Carrera, Sociology

Yann Dufour, Microbiology & Molecular Genetics

Sarah Evans, Zoology, Microbiology & Molecular Genetics and Kellogg Biological Station

Cloe Garnache, Agricultural, Food & Resource Economics

Joseph Hamm, Criminal Justice

Joseph Herriges, Economics

Jade Mitchell, Biosystems & Agricultural Engineering

Amber Pearson, Geography

Lucero Radonic, Anthropology

Matthew Schrenk, Geological Sciences

Ashley Shade, Microbiology & Molecular Genetics

Jay Zarnetske, Geological Sciences

Wei Zhang, Plant, Soil & Microbial Sciences

Adam Zwickle, Criminal Justice

The Water Science Network is supported by funds from the Office of the Vice President for Research and Graduate Studies and is administered by the Environmental Science and Policy Program under the guidance of a water faculty advisory committee. Development of this website was supported by an MSU Global Innovation Fellowship to Dr. Joan Rose.

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